Monday, May 17, 2010

Sharing a printer from Windows 7 to Vista/XP

Many people encounter a problem, when trying to share a local (USB) printer from Windows 7 to it's older cousins, like Windows XP, or Vista.

The problem is that many manufacturers (HP, Canon, etc.) have decided to package their printer drivers into executable installer file, instead of using Microsoft's "inf" file format with libraries.
Windows printer sharing service allows to provide drivers for others versions of Windows for the guest computers, however it requires drivers in the "inf" file format. On the other hand, the guest system can use it's own drivers, if the server (host) doesn't have the correct version, then again it requires the "inf" format. So, apparently, we are in a deadlock.

Fortunately there is a trick that helps to avoid this deadlock.
You will need to: